Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Putin Says Those Pushing Crimean Tatar Cause are Doing It Only for the Money

Paul
Goble

Staunton, August 18 – Reflecting his
longstanding view that leaders but not peoples make history and that the rights
of any ethnic group except those Russians who support him can be dismissed as
fundamentally illegitimate, Vladimir Putin said yesterday that those behind the
Crimean Tatar movement are in it only for the money they can get from grants.

During his visit to Russian-occupied
Crimea, the Kremlin leader dismissed the Crimean Tatar issue by saying that “those
who want to destabilize the situation in Crimea by using the Crimean Tatar
issue want to realize their political ambitions and receive foreign grants as
strugglers for rights” (ru.krymr.mobi/a/27193761.html).

“We know well” who these people are,”
Putin said. They are people “who consider themselves professional strugglers
for rights. For these people it is not important what these rights are and it
is not important whose they are. What is important is that they are strugglers
and that for this struggle they want to receive foreign grants.”

Three things follow from this
perverted Orwellian logic: First, any efforts by Crimean Tatars and their
supporters to achieve even minimal rights will be dismissed as the work of
foreign governments and thus opposed even more harshly by officials on the
scene than they have been up to now.

Second, the likelihood of that may
lead some in the West to pull back from their support of the Crimean Tatars
lest they provoke exactly that outcome.That is clearly what Putin wants and perhaps in some cases even expects.
But it is precisely the opposite of what is needed because of another
consequence of Putin’s remarks.

And third, Putin’s statement, the
repression that will flow from it, and the desire of some outside not to “provoke”
the Kremlin leader will have an impact on the ground, leading to radicalization
of Crimean Tatar opinion and possibly the formation of groups that will decide
they have nothing to lose by taking more dramatic actions.

That has not been the Crimean Tatar
way in the past, but Putin would not be unhappy if he could provoke such an
outcome because then he would be in a position to exploit it both to crack down
even harder on the Ukrainian peninsula and to isolate both the Crimean Tatars
and their Ukrainian allies in the West.

Consequently, even as they face an
ever-more repressive Russian occupation, the Crimean Tatars must remain
disciplined and their supporters in Kyiv and the West remain committed so that
Putin’s contempt for the rights of all peoples except on occasion those of his
own “elect” does not have any more disastrous consequences.